mizukami writes: "Salon.com is running a story about universities moving to profit from code they've developed, rather than release it into the public domain as has been the norm in the past. The story gives the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 as a leading cause."
More money for equipment and research..
by
Manic+Miner
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't know about america, but here in the UK most universities are fairly tight on cash as the government doesn't have enough money to go around. Reciently there has been the introduction of tuition fees to UK universities in an attempt to increase the funding available.
Now Universities have a lot of one thing.. talent. Why shouldn't they use the inventions and intelectual property that they own to generate more money to improve facilities and teaching quality?
Yes, in the past universities have produced decent free products that have encouraged development and standards. But this doesn't mean that it won't happen any more. Each invention needs to be considered and dealt with appropriately. Some inventions will be best as open free code / standards, some will make the university in question money if sold.
So long as the money is re-invested to allow the university to grow then I think this is a great thing.
-- If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
Open source, or truely free?
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dirk
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This article seems to be stuck on the whole "they should release it open source like Linux" idea. I agree that Universities shouldn't be privatizing their ideas and making gobs of money off them by selling them to private interests. But I think they should give them away so everyone can use them, and the only way to do that is to make them public domain (or possibly something like the BSD license). I know everyone will say the GPL is the best way to go, but as they article said, this is for the public good, and that includes people who don't want to use the GPL. If you want to use this code is a closed source app you wouldn't be able to benefit from this (and that includes individuals as well as corporations). I think if they are going to release it, make it PD or BSD, that way the greatest number of people can benefit from it. GPL is a good license, but it's not the freedom something like this requires. This requires the greatest amount of freedom, not freedom with restrictions that your stuff has to be free as well.
--
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Re:Open source, or truely free?
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msouth
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I have posted this elsewhere on this article, sorry for the redundancy. I used to think that all govt funded work should be released under GPL, but I eventually realized that "taxpayers" include "people that want to be able to make money on software", so it seems to me that the only way really be fair is to put it in the public domain and then let everyone develop from there. There is no reason to favor GPL'ers over BSD'ers at the regulatory level. The tax money comes from everyone, so everyone should have equal access to the results to use as they wish. I wrote this up in the debate on siliconvalley.com with Mundie and Perens. I saved a copy here:
http://www.fulcrum.org/features/public_domain.ht ml
-- Liberty uber alles.
public money as WELL?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Last time I heard, you guys paid $30k+/year, whereas in Europe your course really is paid for mostly/all by the state. For e.g., at my uni, there is a gov commitment to pay at least 3/4 if you are UK resident.
I've always seen American uni's as just another business. Or are they so incompetent with funding that they claim to need $30k per student (a lot more than this country claims as being a full yearly course cost!) PLUS government funding?
If the Gov gives the occasional grant.. surely that's no diff to giving the occasional grant to (random example) the airline industry? It doesn't guarantee all taxpayers free plane tickets.
Of course, from this you can argue one of two things -- 1. "exactly, Uni's are private businesses, in fact, the government should stop giving them money altogether" or 2. "exactly, Uni's are public entities, in which case they should be equally accessible regardless of income, like libraries". Anything else is inconsistent.
Re:public money as WELL?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
and how much do you pay in taxes?
you pay the whole amount, and so does your neighbor, who doesnt go to a university...
Don't get me started.
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Quixote
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This really got to me: Bill Hoskins, who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. "Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing," he says.
No, Mr. Hoskins, they knew what they were doing, apparently you don't. If making money was all that mattered to you, you should've joined a corporation.
Re:Don't get me started.
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supersnail
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Berkley did not invent the internet, they did not even invent TCP/IP.
They (Bill Joy really) coded an implementation of the TCP/IP protocol which was already defined and implemented on several other systems.
They did add the standard sockets/inetd interface. And the TCP/IP stack as coded is the basis of nearly all current UNIX and all Windows implementations of TCP/IP.
However this happened largely because the code was free (as in beer), if Berkley had tried to charge for thier TCP/IP stack and patent thier sockets implmentation then SUN, Microsoft et all would probably have written thier own version rather than get into a contractual relationship for a fundamental part of thier systems.
This principal applies to almost any part of the internet as it now exits. Free and open software gets used because it is cheap, easy to improve and easy to standardise. Proprietry software is avoided because of expense, vendor lock in, difficulties in standards setting etc.etc.
As Mike Berniers Lee said "If we had charged for Mosaic nobody would have used it".
-- Old COBOL programmers never die.
They just code in C.
This could backfire
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testy
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· Score: 5, Interesting
If colleges are doing this as a method of enhancing revenue, I have to wonder if they're prepared for the loss of potential alumni contributions that actions like this could cause. There is also the possibility that schools could be found (by a court, for instance, or tax authorities) to be functioning as for-profit entities; that opens up a can of worms that no administrator wants to deal with.
Finally, I'm curious as to how many talented students will be motivated to continue cranking out code for a lab that may take it from them and sell it with no compensation. Comp Sci departments are already struggling with high dropout rates as skilled students leave to make money in full-time positions. I don't see these kinds of actions as ways to encourage good students to stay in school and finish off their degrees.
Socrates should have licensed his works
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The article starts off with the UC system as an example. I can't think of a more pretentious bloated system to use as an example. But it is the leading higher education system in the country so even though its not a surprising example it is valid.
In the UC system you are lucky if you actaully see a professor your first two years. And the UC system has been busy turning itself into a corporation for decades. Learning smerning. Who needs learning when there is money to be made?
And they make a ton of it. But isn't the corruption of education from sport an equally puzzling issue? I mean who doesn't realize college is now a joke? I would say UC has a great reputation because it has the top pick of the largest number of US students many immigrants. That has the more to do with UC glory than anything.
And keeping your intellectual property secret has as much to do with marketing your school (you don't really want the public to be able too see how rather mediocre the professors are) as it does with profit. They go hand in hand.
Two quickies
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halftrack
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· Score: 2, Interesting
1) Had his predecessors understood how huge the Internet would turn out to be, Hoskins figures, they would surely have licensed the protocols, sold the rights to a corporation and collected a royalty for the U.C. Regents on Internet usage years into the future. Does this person know how the IT market works, how people think about abstracktities like the Internet? "Isn't free, will only consider it."
2) Software for modeling global climate change, the behavior of viral epidemics and traffic patterns are among the programs researchers can't get released, he says. This kind of software not having the greatest market (how often do you wish to simulate a viral epidemic) makes it extremly expencive makeing it more probable that those who do need it makes it themself - also releasing it commercial. That makes to great pieces of code that could have been the best ever had they learnt from any of each-others mistakes (even great code has got bugs and stupidities.)
-- Look a monkey!
Re:The dabate of late has been...
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sql*kitten
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· Score: 5, Interesting
we need more money for education... well now you have a choice, either they can sell the code they have developed, or taxes can go up...
If NCSA hadn't been quite so... obstructive, the university probably have gotten a huge donation from Netscape Corporation at the height of the bubble, which if they were smart they'd have converted to cash money. The same's true for UCB and Cisco... probably many other situations too, where companies are spun off, or founded by graduates using intellectual property.
Universities aren't built to make money directly be releasing products per se. You can't even count degree-granting as such; your money buys you the right to attend classes and sit exams, not to pass them. Universities also earn money by conducting research for industry, but the nature of research is that it's open-ended and ongoing, more like a time-and-materials contract (like a consulancy) than a units-shipped model (like a games house).
Universities can make money in the private sector, but they way to do it isn't to imitate corporations. Taking equity in a spin off to exploit research funded by the university itself from an internal budget in return for facilities space is a proven model.
Finally, this scenario is different in the UK, where the majority of university funding comes from the taxpayer. The license attached to that code should make it free for use by UK citizens, but charge a fee to everyone else.
Public funding of Free Software
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martinde
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My personal opinion is the that government should be Free Software's biggest friend. I feel that public monies should be used to benefit as many people as possible (not frivously though), and that by supporting Free Software development, more people will benefit than buy investing in proprietary applications.
So, how does one get the government to buy into this plan? Perhaps it's time that the Free Software Foundation or Software in the Public Interest hires a professional lobbyist to make some inroads into the US and other governments. Free Software is reaching the point where it is a highly viable alternative to propietary solutions. With the proper lobbying and data showing positive cost/benefit analysis, perhaps we can get more momentum behind Free Software.
So what about private schools?
by
Asikaa
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The headline Public Money, Private Code would suggest that the principal objection here is that state schools might use taxpayers' money to develop applications for profit.
Or are we talking about using students' code for profit?
Either way it could be argued that the college is maximising its assets to bring in more money to increase the standard of education at that school. Idealistically, the more money a college makes, the less it has to charge for tuition, meaning more people can afford to study there.
It's standard practice in the corporate world that the employer owns the rights to employees' code if that code was developed on the company's dime. Does this principle stand for students' work, done on University computers during classes?
How does the/. community feel about a private school selling applications that were developed in-house by paid IT staff?
I'm curious because I work in the IT services department of a private school.
--
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
Look at FFTW, for instance
by
adadun
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· Score: 3, Interesting
FFTW, "the fastest Fast Fourier Transform in the West", is an implementation of the DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) that was developed as part of a research project at MIT. FFTW is released under the GPL, and Section 1.4 in their FAQ one can read that they are using the system you describe:
We could instead have released FFTW under the LGPL, or even disallowed non-Free usage. Suffice it to say, however, that MIT owns the copyright to FFTW and they only let us GPL it because we convinced them that it would neither affect their licensing revenue nor irritate existing licensees.
Re:Fine by me
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
My university did this on occassion.
They also paid fairly healthy royalties to the students involved.
So it ended up being good for everyone. The university got funding for its programs, and the students ended up with some extra cash and a really nice bullet-point on their resumes.
Ideally, U.S. schools would get sufficient funding, and wouldn't need to do this. Since that isn't the case, I think we could do a lot worse than the above.
Re:Let's just kill the goose, shall we?
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dunstan
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Exactly. Look at some of the technologies which were developed by Sun:
NFS - released for free. Widespread.
NeWS - brilliant Windowing system, far better than X. Kept Proprietary. Died.
Java - released for free (effectively). Widespread
To roughly quote Stallman: making people pay money each time they use a copy of your software is the biggest disincentive you can create for its widespread adoption
Dunstan
--
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Re:It only makes sense
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goldspider
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Trust me, educational institutions are already making enough money on their own without selling the fruits of students' labor. But then, they've been doing that for a long time.
What many people apparently don't realize is that alot of research conducted by universities is subsidised by various interest groups. The research that comes out of these programs becomes property of the University and is passed on to whoever funded the research. The only thing the students (who did most of the work) receive in compensation is 3 or 4 credits.
I doubt this is true about CS and related programs at Penn State (where I recently graduated from), and to my knowledge, they do not claim ownership of students' code. But don't get me wrong, they stick it to us in another way.
Students in "non-engineering technology majors" are now assessed a $750 surcharge per semester to (supposedly) cover costs of their respective majors. I don't know exactly how many students this includes, but you can bet Penn State is making a boatload of money from it.
So no, we don't need to take money from the military to dump into an already greedy education system.
-- "Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Biting the hand that feeds:
by
aphor
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If you think the move to privatize CS research is natural and good, you are mistaken because you do not understand the economics of the scientific process and peer-review. If the universities and labs make valuable software, then why shouldn't they make money off of it? Oh, they should "make money off of it" for sure, I'm not arguing that. What you have to understand about my argument is that you can make money without restricting software distribution. You don't have to say "you can't copy it or use it or see it unless you pay me first."
Economically, it is crucial to learn the difference between economic value and market value. If you say the distinction is unimportant, let me remind you there is no such thing as a free-market economy where economic and market value are fully balanced. There are cases where a thing has more economic value than market value and vice versa.
A piece of research software, in the form of a source tarball, can be compiled into a useful productive component of a machine. It can also be modified, improved, extended, etc. to create a new source tarball which can be compiled into a superior component of a productive machine. The source of the value in any of these elements is the ingenuity of those who created the original source code (or those who created the theory behind it). Most of the combined science of prior history is always a necessary ingredient for this ingenuity and vision.
Newton: "If I have seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Ask yourself if you could do without Newtonian Physics on the chance that prior work was unavailable because some greedy short-sighted boob decided not to let anyone read Aristotle (for example) on the off-chance something of great value would come of it and boob would be left out? If you think about it, I.P. licensors are usually assholes trying to set up a retirement plan based on the value of someone else's continuing work.
You can't believe in God if you believe in intellectual property. You can't take it with you!
Now the economy is "adjusting" to the wild ambitions of people who discovered the Internet late... People who were around for the whole thing know that the value of the Internet is actually pent-up demand coming from prior licensing bungling with the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Circut-Switched networks are not as efficient as Packet-Switching.
I'm sorry for the livid tone, but I'm tired of all the whining Ayn-Rand type wannabes running around thinking "I'm a good person, I suffer righteously, and I got the other guy down so I'm gonna stick it to him!"
I know (because I'm educated) that the litmus test for what side you're on is whether you believe you're partly responsible to future generations or not. Just think about what kind of world you would like to be born into and live that choice. Damn. I'm too worked up to even finish an argument. I retract everything. Forget I said any of this...
-- ---
Nothing clever here: move along now...
Re: Tuition increases
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King_TJ
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· Score: 5, Interesting
No, Universities have not "suddenly gotten greedy". The problem is, they've been too greedy for a long time - and the results are really starting to show!
I place most of the blame at the feet of the upper-level administrators of the colleges and Universities. My father is a PhD, teaching at a state-owned college, and the level of corruption is incredible. The dean and his appointees all give themselves large raises every year, while he announces to the faculty that once again, he won't be able to give out a raise due to budget constraints. He also, of course, feels his job requires the college to provide him with a car.
All of this starts a chain-reaction, where you get only bottom-of-the-barrel teachers willing to work there. These "teachers", in turn, pass students on through the system without ensuring that they've really learned the material. (For the small salaries they're paid, they don't want to put up with fights with students who scream and moan that it's "unfair I got an F in your class!")
These same deans and administrators are more concerned that their campus looks impressive and top-notch than whether or not their teachers are using the latest textbooks. They know that lucrative govt. grants aren't possible without dazzling the TV and print media. In fact, they typically spend so much time being a spokesperson for the college/University, they fail to notice what goes on "day to day" in the institution.
When they do win these grants, do they really help the students? Only partially. Again, grants are great profit-makers for the higher-ups. I've heard stories of schools that hire people full-time just to research and apply for as many grants as possible. Then, these people get a cut of the money off the top as a reward for each one they get.
Re:It's more complicated.
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msouth
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Disclaimer: I did not read the article.
Second, many government research contracts force the professors to share their code.
Can you back this up? I am not sure why it was in the same paragraph with:
The Mach
kernel, for instance, began life at Carnagie Mellon thanks to government money. Rick Rashid, one
of the project's leaders, released it with a very open BSD-like license. He says that work developed
with the public money deserves to be as free as possible. This has been going on for some time.
In this case, you have a person who realized that decided he should license things this way, and did so. I think that, when it happens, this is why.
I have worked on various projects that were funded by your tax money, and they are now being sold as proprietary software. In that case, the person who got the grant did not decide to put it out as open source. I also do not have numbers to back myself up, but I am guessing that the vast majority of government contracts do not require the source code to be released under a BSD type license.
I wrote something about this on the siliconvalley.com debate with Mundie et al:
The situation in British Columbia
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I recently have been a student at one of the post-secondary school in BC, Canada.
The universities/colleges/tech institutes that run F/T programs and are accreditted for diploma/degree granting have had their tuitions frozen by the Govn't for the past several years. While this means that the average student ends up paying less, it also means that there is a further burden on the school as the govn't didn't give more funding to them, it just stopped tuition increases.
Therefore, the schools must come up with funding in various ways. Considering that most profs at these schools could get almost double working a commercial contract, it is hard to keep them... especially when the equipment is out of date or the conditions are bad. The way to fix these issues is to have more money.
Now where I went, the British Columbia Institute of Technology ( http://www.bcit.ca ), we were lucky that some of our depts were sponsored by industry. Also, we charged the companies that wished to have us do practicums with them $$. Albiet a small sum.
One of the legal issues we did discuss was ownership of the code that we produce. While we did code it, sometimes at home and sometimes at school, the task was assigned by the prof, and therefore the school. In that view, the IP belongs to the school since they were the ones that requested the project and it is by implicit agreement that the code is the schools (as we are paying the school to teach us).
I know there is some feeling that there should be some rights that the student should have for the code because they "pay" for education...but I think you are paying to get taught. The method of that teaching is of the school's choosing and as such is IP of the school.
So how does this reflect here... well, with the school owning the code, it can do with it as it wishes. If it wants to sell it, fine! If it wants to donate it, fine! As long as they don't say someone else (other than you) coded it... (copyright laws) it is just fine.
As a student that did a practicum, the deals struck with the companies are between the school and the company... so any ownership agreement they reach is up to them. The standard one is that the company recieves ownership of any work done for them.
This may seem like it is rediculous given that they pay such a "small" amount, however the students are not professionals YET, and the company is taking on the risk that the project won't be completed, that it won't be EXACTLY what they want, that there will be bugs, and that it will take 1 or 2 semesters to complete.
The school gets some money and the students get "real-world" (tm) experience in return.
Oh yes..rant of the day... US Military budget should be slashed (do they really need soo many ships/planes/tanks?) and the money given to research, NASA, and schooling. After all...canada has almost no military..and we don't get invaded. (In fact... when our neighbours try to invade us they get trounced..and then have a cetain white house burned to the ground... and we don't even have a constitutional right to be idiotic hicks who carry guns because it makes them feel like a man)
What makes money will become priorty
by
penguin_dance
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The problem with this is the University will then start looking at projects as to whether it would be profitable. Who knows, the next big idea could be squashed because some bean counter thinks it has no potential.
Also, why should we fund them with public money if they're going to turn around and try to become Fortune 500 company?
This is what has happened to the news media. Now it's no longer getting out the actual stories...its getting out the loudest "teaser" that will draw in the viewers and, therefore, advertisers.
-- If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Re:It only makes sense
by
peripatetic_bum
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· Score: 2, Interesting
By the same token, you can offer the best education if you can afford the best teachers which implies competition which in turn implies capitalism and profits.
Wrong again. Public school should be likened more to basic research. Basic research is funded for the sake of being able to do basic research. Public education should be funded for the sake of public education. In both cases, we can not predict what specifically will prove most beneficial when we fund it, thus it makes no sense to fund it like a business. What I am trying to say is no one "betted" on the internet and wanted to make it a business when it first started.
You are so shallow. I put my name by my opinions?
are you not so shallow that you go AC?
It was not "capitalism" that left Argentina penniless, it was overgrown and badly managed government.
Once again, you seem to not get exactly what capitalism really is. I would argue that capitalism causing bas government: Ever heard of Bail-Out in the 80's. MMmmm, thats real capitalism, that was fucked up governement too, buddy
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about america, but here in the UK most universities are fairly tight on cash as the government doesn't have enough money to go around. Reciently there has been the introduction of tuition fees to UK universities in an attempt to increase the funding available.
Now Universities have a lot of one thing.. talent. Why shouldn't they use the inventions and intelectual property that they own to generate more money to improve facilities and teaching quality?
Yes, in the past universities have produced decent free products that have encouraged development and standards. But this doesn't mean that it won't happen any more. Each invention needs to be considered and dealt with appropriately. Some inventions will be best as open free code / standards, some will make the university in question money if sold.
So long as the money is re-invested to allow the university to grow then I think this is a great thing.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
This article seems to be stuck on the whole "they should release it open source like Linux" idea. I agree that Universities shouldn't be privatizing their ideas and making gobs of money off them by selling them to private interests. But I think they should give them away so everyone can use them, and the only way to do that is to make them public domain (or possibly something like the BSD license). I know everyone will say the GPL is the best way to go, but as they article said, this is for the public good, and that includes people who don't want to use the GPL. If you want to use this code is a closed source app you wouldn't be able to benefit from this (and that includes individuals as well as corporations). I think if they are going to release it, make it PD or BSD, that way the greatest number of people can benefit from it. GPL is a good license, but it's not the freedom something like this requires. This requires the greatest amount of freedom, not freedom with restrictions that your stuff has to be free as well.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Last time I heard, you guys paid $30k+/year, whereas in Europe your course really is paid for mostly/all by the state. For e.g., at my uni, there is a gov commitment to pay at least 3/4 if you are UK resident.
I've always seen American uni's as just another business. Or are they so incompetent with funding that they claim to need $30k per student (a lot more than this country claims as being a full yearly course cost!) PLUS government funding?
If the Gov gives the occasional grant.. surely that's no diff to giving the occasional grant to (random example) the airline industry? It doesn't guarantee all taxpayers free plane tickets.
Of course, from this you can argue one of two things -- 1. "exactly, Uni's are private businesses, in fact, the government should stop giving them money altogether" or 2. "exactly, Uni's are public entities, in which case they should be equally accessible regardless of income, like libraries". Anything else is inconsistent.
This really got to me:
Bill Hoskins, who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. "Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing," he says.
No, Mr. Hoskins, they knew what they were doing, apparently you don't. If making money was all that mattered to you, you should've joined a corporation.
Finally, I'm curious as to how many talented students will be motivated to continue cranking out code for a lab that may take it from them and sell it with no compensation. Comp Sci departments are already struggling with high dropout rates as skilled students leave to make money in full-time positions. I don't see these kinds of actions as ways to encourage good students to stay in school and finish off their degrees.
The article starts off with the UC system as an example. I can't think of a more pretentious bloated system to use as an example. But it is the leading higher education system in the country so even though its not a surprising example it is valid.
In the UC system you are lucky if you actaully see a professor your first two years. And the UC system has been busy turning itself into a corporation for decades. Learning smerning. Who needs learning when there is money to be made?
And they make a ton of it. But isn't the corruption of education from sport an equally puzzling issue? I mean who doesn't realize college is now a joke? I would say UC has a great reputation because it has the top pick of the largest number of US students many immigrants. That has the more to do with UC glory than anything.
And keeping your intellectual property secret has as much to do with marketing your school (you don't really want the public to be able too see how rather mediocre the professors are) as it does with profit. They go hand in hand.
1) Had his predecessors understood how huge the Internet would turn out to be, Hoskins figures, they would surely have licensed the protocols, sold the rights to a corporation and collected a royalty for the U.C. Regents on Internet usage years into the future. Does this person know how the IT market works, how people think about abstracktities like the Internet? "Isn't free, will only consider it."
2) Software for modeling global climate change, the behavior of viral epidemics and traffic patterns are among the programs researchers can't get released, he says. This kind of software not having the greatest market (how often do you wish to simulate a viral epidemic) makes it extremly expencive makeing it more probable that those who do need it makes it themself - also releasing it commercial. That makes to great pieces of code that could have been the best ever had they learnt from any of each-others mistakes (even great code has got bugs and stupidities.)
Look a monkey!
we need more money for education... well now you have a choice, either they can sell the code they have developed, or taxes can go up...
If NCSA hadn't been quite so... obstructive, the university probably have gotten a huge donation from Netscape Corporation at the height of the bubble, which if they were smart they'd have converted to cash money. The same's true for UCB and Cisco... probably many other situations too, where companies are spun off, or founded by graduates using intellectual property.
Universities aren't built to make money directly be releasing products per se. You can't even count degree-granting as such; your money buys you the right to attend classes and sit exams, not to pass them. Universities also earn money by conducting research for industry, but the nature of research is that it's open-ended and ongoing, more like a time-and-materials contract (like a consulancy) than a units-shipped model (like a games house).
Universities can make money in the private sector, but they way to do it isn't to imitate corporations. Taking equity in a spin off to exploit research funded by the university itself from an internal budget in return for facilities space is a proven model.
Finally, this scenario is different in the UK, where the majority of university funding comes from the taxpayer. The license attached to that code should make it free for use by UK citizens, but charge a fee to everyone else.
My personal opinion is the that government should be Free Software's biggest friend. I feel that public monies should be used to benefit as many people as possible (not frivously though), and that by supporting Free Software development, more people will benefit than buy investing in proprietary applications.
So, how does one get the government to buy into this plan? Perhaps it's time that the Free Software Foundation or Software in the Public Interest hires a professional lobbyist to make some inroads into the US and other governments. Free Software is reaching the point where it is a highly viable alternative to propietary solutions. With the proper lobbying and data showing positive cost/benefit analysis, perhaps we can get more momentum behind Free Software.
Or are we talking about using students' code for profit?
Either way it could be argued that the college is maximising its assets to bring in more money to increase the standard of education at that school. Idealistically, the more money a college makes, the less it has to charge for tuition, meaning more people can afford to study there.
It's standard practice in the corporate world that the employer owns the rights to employees' code if that code was developed on the company's dime. Does this principle stand for students' work, done on University computers during classes?
How does the /. community feel about a private school selling applications that were developed in-house by paid IT staff?
I'm curious because I work in the IT services department of a private school.
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
My university did this on occassion.
They also paid fairly healthy royalties to the students involved.
So it ended up being good for everyone. The university got funding for its programs, and the students ended up with some extra cash and a really nice bullet-point on their resumes.
Ideally, U.S. schools would get sufficient funding, and wouldn't need to do this. Since that isn't the case, I think we could do a lot worse than the above.
Exactly. Look at some of the technologies which were developed by Sun:
NFS - released for free. Widespread.
NeWS - brilliant Windowing system, far better than X. Kept Proprietary. Died.
Java - released for free (effectively). Widespread
To roughly quote Stallman: making people pay money each time they use a copy of your software is the biggest disincentive you can create for its widespread adoption
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
What many people apparently don't realize is that alot of research conducted by universities is subsidised by various interest groups. The research that comes out of these programs becomes property of the University and is passed on to whoever funded the research. The only thing the students (who did most of the work) receive in compensation is 3 or 4 credits.
I doubt this is true about CS and related programs at Penn State (where I recently graduated from), and to my knowledge, they do not claim ownership of students' code. But don't get me wrong, they stick it to us in another way.
Students in "non-engineering technology majors" are now assessed a $750 surcharge per semester to (supposedly) cover costs of their respective majors. I don't know exactly how many students this includes, but you can bet Penn State is making a boatload of money from it.
So no, we don't need to take money from the military to dump into an already greedy education system.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
If you think the move to privatize CS research is natural and good, you are mistaken because you do not understand the economics of the scientific process and peer-review. If the universities and labs make valuable software, then why shouldn't they make money off of it? Oh, they should "make money off of it" for sure, I'm not arguing that. What you have to understand about my argument is that you can make money without restricting software distribution. You don't have to say "you can't copy it or use it or see it unless you pay me first."
Economically, it is crucial to learn the difference between economic value and market value. If you say the distinction is unimportant, let me remind you there is no such thing as a free-market economy where economic and market value are fully balanced. There are cases where a thing has more economic value than market value and vice versa.
A piece of research software, in the form of a source tarball, can be compiled into a useful productive component of a machine. It can also be modified, improved, extended, etc. to create a new source tarball which can be compiled into a superior component of a productive machine. The source of the value in any of these elements is the ingenuity of those who created the original source code (or those who created the theory behind it). Most of the combined science of prior history is always a necessary ingredient for this ingenuity and vision.
Newton: "If I have seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Ask yourself if you could do without Newtonian Physics on the chance that prior work was unavailable because some greedy short-sighted boob decided not to let anyone read Aristotle (for example) on the off-chance something of great value would come of it and boob would be left out? If you think about it, I.P. licensors are usually assholes trying to set up a retirement plan based on the value of someone else's continuing work.
You can't believe in God if you believe in intellectual property. You can't take it with you!
Now the economy is "adjusting" to the wild ambitions of people who discovered the Internet late... People who were around for the whole thing know that the value of the Internet is actually pent-up demand coming from prior licensing bungling with the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Circut-Switched networks are not as efficient as Packet-Switching.
I'm sorry for the livid tone, but I'm tired of all the whining Ayn-Rand type wannabes running around thinking "I'm a good person, I suffer righteously, and I got the other guy down so I'm gonna stick it to him!"
I know (because I'm educated) that the litmus test for what side you're on is whether you believe you're partly responsible to future generations or not. Just think about what kind of world you would like to be born into and live that choice. Damn. I'm too worked up to even finish an argument. I retract everything. Forget I said any of this...
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
No, Universities have not "suddenly gotten greedy". The problem is, they've been too greedy for a long time - and the results are really starting to show!
I place most of the blame at the feet of the upper-level administrators of the colleges and Universities. My father is a PhD, teaching at a state-owned college, and the level of corruption is incredible. The dean and his appointees all give themselves large raises every year, while he announces to the faculty that once again, he won't be able to give out a raise due to budget constraints. He also, of course, feels his job requires the college to provide him with a car.
All of this starts a chain-reaction, where you get only bottom-of-the-barrel teachers willing to work there. These "teachers", in turn, pass students on through the system without ensuring that they've really learned the material. (For the small salaries they're paid, they don't want to put up with fights with students who scream and moan that it's "unfair I got an F in your class!")
These same deans and administrators are more concerned that their campus looks impressive and top-notch than whether or not their teachers are using the latest textbooks. They know that lucrative govt. grants aren't possible without dazzling the TV and print media. In fact, they typically spend so much time being a spokesperson for the college/University, they fail to notice what goes on "day to day" in the institution.
When they do win these grants, do they really help the students? Only partially. Again, grants are great profit-makers for the higher-ups. I've heard stories of schools that hire people full-time just to research and apply for as many grants as possible. Then, these people get a cut of the money off the top as a reward for each one they get.
Second, many government research contracts force the professors to share their code.
Can you back this up? I am not sure why it was in the same paragraph with:
The Mach kernel, for instance, began life at Carnagie Mellon thanks to government money. Rick Rashid, one of the project's leaders, released it with a very open BSD-like license. He says that work developed with the public money deserves to be as free as possible. This has been going on for some time.
In this case, you have a person who realized that decided he should license things this way, and did so. I think that, when it happens, this is why.
I have worked on various projects that were funded by your tax money, and they are now being sold as proprietary software. In that case, the person who got the grant did not decide to put it out as open source. I also do not have numbers to back myself up, but I am guessing that the vast majority of government contracts do not require the source code to be released under a BSD type license.
I wrote something about this on the siliconvalley.com debate with Mundie et al:
http://www.fulcrum.org/features/public_domain.html
Liberty uber alles.
I recently have been a student at one of the post-secondary school in BC, Canada.
The universities/colleges/tech institutes that run F/T programs and are accreditted for diploma/degree granting have had their tuitions frozen by the Govn't for the past several years. While this means that the average student ends up paying less, it also means that there is a further burden on the school as the govn't didn't give more funding to them, it just stopped tuition increases.
Therefore, the schools must come up with funding in various ways. Considering that most profs at these schools could get almost double working a commercial contract, it is hard to keep them... especially when the equipment is out of date or the conditions are bad. The way to fix these issues is to have more money.
Now where I went, the British Columbia Institute of Technology ( http://www.bcit.ca ), we were lucky that some of our depts were sponsored by industry. Also, we charged the companies that wished to have us do practicums with them $$. Albiet a small sum.
One of the legal issues we did discuss was ownership of the code that we produce. While we did code it, sometimes at home and sometimes at school, the task was assigned by the prof, and therefore the school. In that view, the IP belongs to the school since they were the ones that requested the project and it is by implicit agreement that the code is the schools (as we are paying the school to teach us).
I know there is some feeling that there should be some rights that the student should have for the code because they "pay" for education...but I think you are paying to get taught. The method of that teaching is of the school's choosing and as such is IP of the school.
So how does this reflect here... well, with the school owning the code, it can do with it as it wishes. If it wants to sell it, fine! If it wants to donate it, fine! As long as they don't say someone else (other than you) coded it... (copyright laws) it is just fine.
As a student that did a practicum, the deals struck with the companies are between the school and the company... so any ownership agreement they reach is up to them. The standard one is that the company recieves ownership of any work done for them.
This may seem like it is rediculous given that they pay such a "small" amount, however the students are not professionals YET, and the company is taking on the risk that the project won't be completed, that it won't be EXACTLY what they want, that there will be bugs, and that it will take 1 or 2 semesters to complete.
The school gets some money and the students get "real-world" (tm) experience in return.
Oh yes..rant of the day... US Military budget should be slashed (do they really need soo many ships/planes/tanks?) and the money given to research, NASA, and schooling. After all...canada has almost no military..and we don't get invaded. (In fact... when our neighbours try to invade us they get trounced..and then have a cetain white house burned to the ground... and we don't even have a constitutional right to be idiotic hicks who carry guns because it makes them feel like a man)
The problem with this is the University will then start looking at projects as to whether it would be profitable. Who knows, the next big idea could be squashed because some bean counter thinks it has no potential.
Also, why should we fund them with public money if they're going to turn around and try to become Fortune 500 company?
This is what has happened to the news media. Now it's no longer getting out the actual stories...its getting out the loudest "teaser" that will draw in the viewers and, therefore, advertisers.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
By the same token, you can offer the best education if you can afford the best teachers which implies competition which in turn implies capitalism and profits.
Wrong again. Public school should be likened more to basic research. Basic research is funded for the sake of being able to do basic research. Public education should be funded for the sake of public education. In both cases, we can not predict what specifically will prove most beneficial when we fund it, thus it makes no sense to fund it like a business. What I am trying to say is no one "betted" on the internet and wanted to make it a business when it first started.
You are so shallow.
I put my name by my opinions?
are you not so shallow that you go AC?
It was not "capitalism" that left Argentina penniless, it was overgrown and badly managed government.
Once again, you seem to not get exactly what capitalism really is. I would argue that capitalism causing bas government: Ever heard of Bail-Out in the 80's. MMmmm, thats real capitalism, that was fucked up governement too, buddy
Sigs are dangerous coy things